There has been an increasing social concern of energy saving due to global warming for controlling environmental apparatus, for example, air conditioning apparatus installed in buildings. BEMS (Building and Energy Management System) is now proposed to optimize energy management in the building. Actually, most of building administrators do not always operate and manage the environmental apparatus properly in view of energy-saving and comfortableness. Especially for temperature control of an enclosed residential space in the building where the comfortableness may conflict with the energy-saving, it has been a common practice to rely solely upon a customary temperature setting and adjust the temperature setting upon request by residents.
Since the temperature control has been made without sufficient consideration of the building characteristics and the resident's preference, the residential space is not always kept at an optimum condition that the residents feel comfort, and even the energy for the air conditioning apparatus may be wasted. Further, the residents may have complaints about that he or she is not able to control the environment on his or her own initiative.
In order to cope with the above problem, Japanese Patent Publication No. 2004-205202 proposes a system for controlling the temperature environment in reflectance of demands from the residents, i.e., temperature raising demand, i.e., temperature lowering demand, and temperature keeping demand. The system is configured to provide an initial target temperature based upon environmental parameters such as ambient air temperature, radiant temperature, humidity, air velocity metabolic rate, and cloth index. Then, the system collects and analyzes the demands from the residents so as to modify the initial target temperature to a working target temperature based upon the analysis of the demands, and instructs to vary or maintain the environmental temperature towards or at the working temperature for satisfying the predominant demand each time the system analyzes the demands.
In the above system, the initial target temperature (Ts') is set to be around a center of a comfortable range (X) which is determined by the above environmental parameters and is given by use of a known prediction of thermal comfort, for example, Fanger's comfort equation. As shown in FIG. 5A, the center of the comfortable range (X) is indicative of a temperature (Ts') at which most of the residents are predicted to feel comfortable. In other words, the system starts always with the temperature (Ts') at the expense of considerable energy consumption, regardless of the fact that there may be another starting temperature which may satisfy the predominant demand from the residents and at the same time save the energy. In this sense, the prior art system is insufficient to achieve the temperature control in consistent with the demands from the residents, while focusing on the energy-saving.